Friday, May 27, 2011

Oh China, You Crazy Cats are at it Again...

Guards at a labor camp in northern China were forcing some 300 prisoners to farm.

Okay, you say, in your way, today, yay! Farming might be expected at a labor camp. What's the big deal?

The big deal, I say, irritated by your stupid interruption, is that they weren't doing regular farming, they were gold farming. For anyone who doesn't know, gold farming is the practice of playing an online MMO such as World of Warcraft, collecting as much gold as you can, and then selling it to gamers for real money. Yes, people do that.

WoW has a policy against gold farming, but really, you think the guards who were hawking the online gold for cash really care?

According to Liu Dali, who was imprisoned between 2004 - 2007 for "illegally petitioning" federal authorities about corruption in his local government, said that after a long day of having to carve chopsticks and toothpicks by hand, he would be forced to spend hours farming for gold online, and if he failed to meet either his day or night quota he would be beaten with plastic pipes.

Dali said that the online farming was more profitable than the physical labor they were doing, turning in around $770 to $925 a day.